Yeah.....except that the film is fascinating in just one way: to watch Keaton as being one of the few performers who could make a role in which he is seen mostly from behind interesting. Keaton does take a typical Samuel Beckett one-note idea pretending to be obscure and deep (Beckett was such a darling of the pretentious and pseudo-intellectuals just because he would never cop to those concepts, or would hide them further in obscurist bullshit if someone asked him to explain, if you want a real laugh, read the essay that one was supposed to be presented to read BEFORE one watched FILM) and makes something of it.

I always was amused by Director Alan Schneider's condescending remarks about Keaton in his own ego-over-talent-driven autobiography, he basically dismisses Keaton as a broken-down old clown, when it's obvious that Keaton is the only reason the film has had any immortality at all. Buster was onto the whole thing from the get-go, when asked what it was all about hit nail-head with the response, " You can't run away from yourself", and while Schneider and Beckett snickered at Keaton's on-set non-chalance and supposed philistinism (he apparently read the newspaper while they agonized over their frankly amateurish grasp of filmmaking), Keaton would then with seeming effortlessness saunter on-camera and bring whatever brilliance there was to this table. The irony is that of Keaton's late-life short films like THE HOMEOWNER, THE RAILRODDER, and THE SCRIBE, FILM is pretty much the least of them, and it was the only one with any pretentions towards "art".

I believe Beckett himself said he needed Keaton as someone who was instantly recognizable from the back.

I just happen to watch THE SCRIBE again earlier this week. That man was like a Timex. He just kept on ticking...When I was a young lad trying to discern Keaton's massive filmography, I always assumed that this film was a biblical epic.